January 6, 2026 - It's the day after Valentine's day. Snow is falling in big fluffy flakes, and I’ve just fallen flat on my ass outside tonight's apartment venue. A couple walks by; one of them just did the exact same thing around the corner, and we have that instantaneous and brief snow day connection while laughing it off— it’s really coming down! It’s a wasteland out here! Be careful, get home safe! I make it around the back of the building where the entrance to the stairwell is propped open with a brick, push open the door, and promptly fall down into the basement. This is decidedly less funny.
Up three flights of stairs is the living room where a supergroup of friends and I are playing acoustic sets tonight. Off the stairwell in the smoke room, people are catching up and drawing in chalk on the wall. It’s mostly cupid’s arrow hearts: R+C, A+Y, carved lovingly into the bark. Eventually everyone starts to settle down in front of the couch while Lucy sets up. Soon there’s barely space to make your way to an open pocket with all of us packed in like sardines. People keep trying to open up the windows further but they’re making awkward reaches, knocking around candles on the windowsills; multiple near-misses of hair and fire related disaster follow. Heads pop out of the kitchen when we run out of floor. Everyone in the room has complimented Sammy’s hat.
Each one of us are in bands or front bands or love bands that are, by all standards, loud as fuck. Bands that invite reckless motion and the blurry half-drunk feeling of spreading into each other like watercolors. Tonight everyone is rapt, silent, looking up with doe eyes. It occurs to me I’ve only really ever spoken to some of these people in places where we’ve had to yell, and all of a sudden it’s overwhelmingly quiet. Getting to hear (truly hear!) your friends sing for the first time is like infinite little kisses on the forehead. Aidan’s making tea in the kitchen and the kettle is singing along.
I say I’m too sleepy to go out and still end up at the bar, guitar and all. But I quickly realize I was, in fact, too sleepy. After one (1) cranberry juice, I start my trek home in the snow. Waiting for the train, I turn over lyrics from Ari’s friendship song in my head like a coin between my fingers:
Your love is good to me
This love's too good for me
You’re just too good for me
Your love is good for me
Your love’s too good for me
I think you’re good for me
I muse on this until I’m doused with slush by a passing car. On the train ride home I sit next to two identical couples, each consisting of a normal guy and his gorgeous goth girlfriend. Happy Valentine’s Day.
July 13th. Last time I saw KO Queen I broke my glasses in the pit. This time we're at church.
Ash and Tony and I have peeled ourselves off of lawn chairs to descend into the seventh circle of Pissmas 4. I keep thinking everyone is here and then more everyone shows up. We've made it for the end of PV, which has more people on stage than I ever thought possible. There's something vaguely clownish about their sound today. Fittingly about 10 steps behind me there's a clown in a cage.
Snuffhustler goes corporate. Space Camp is routinely the best band ever. On the lawn between sets Chase is having strong opinions on local album releases. We take a gas station snack run. Where did the giant sword come from again? There's reverence in the air mixed with vape clouds. Everyone keeps finding new ways to give, to organize, to make everyone in the room laugh, the infinite gift of life and music and love for your friends.
I was born on September 1st, Allston Christmas. (Allston Jesus, delivered under the Night Star, Dom once said, and I've never stopped quoting). That is to say I've never had a normal Boston birthday. Every year I've been moving myself or someone else, running up and down flights of stairs with boxes and desks, loading trucks and trying to keep the cat inside. This year, I was out, for good, on the 25th of August. A pink armchair that had been a staple of my apartments for the past three years went back to the street from which it came, to another loving host. I couldn't help but feel left out when my birthday came around. The chaos! The mutual upheaval, exhaustion, renewal in a new place! It's an unusual thing to feel yourself moving (literally) inexplicably alongside what feels like an entire city. It's one of my favorite things about Boston and tragically one reason why it is so hard to plant roots there. It is a city mired in transition and consequently most people see it as transitory. But what could be more beautiful than shedding skin alongside all the people you love?
Back to Valentine's day, the real one this time. The first time I went to O’Brien’s, it was to play my first show with a band to an audience of about 15 people (if we’re being generous). Maybe it was because I was underage, or because the door guy was kind of a dick, but I vowed I’d never go back. And yet, like a moth to the neon PBR logo…
This February 14th I dance all night with Arro and Mo and Judith and KC, with dear friends and dear strangers. I push around with a purpose during warmachine. I scream to Paper Lady and shake ass to Pons and eat shit— unbeknownst to me, for the first of three times this weekend— during Nurse Joy (RIP). If it sparks joy, then nurse it! On stage Arro announces, "Everyone here is my girlfriend. Especially my girlfriend." And I beam and beam and beam.
After the show I’m loitering at the merch table when Joe, the bartender, comes up to Mae. He says something to the effect of, he’s been bartending forever, been in bands forever, and he’s seen a lot of bad music. But watching Nurse Joy and seeing all these kids dance made him proud and gave him hope. Mae tries to get a word in between “thank you’s”, ask him about his band or his life outside the bar, and Joe bulldozes right over it to keep raving, as if he feels his time here is almost up, as if he will never really have the time or the proper words to express what tonight meant to him. Sheepish, like a kid meeting their hero. He invites everyone back— “Play a show on a Wednesday! I’m here on Wednesdays!”
Time moves fast and energy wanes. Load in load out load in load out drink PBRs like water. And every once in a while, everyone moves together for the same purpose, a hand grazing your cheek in affection, saying I’m here and you’re here and it wouldn’t be the same without us. It's all love, packed exponentially beyond fire code into apartments and basements with an open flame. I watch 15-year-old videos of bands in the same rooms I know inside and out now, read stories from Ohio in the 90s, and feel like I could cry at the mirror, everything lost to time and everything built in its memory. People are always making music, they’ll always find ways to play it. In every scene there are kernels of familiarity. But the people you run into, the places you go, the sidewalks, the subways, the corporate ponds, the supermarkets and stupid giant Citgo signs make everything special, everything significant. Nothing will ever be quite like this, right here, right now. We’ve already been here in another lifetime. We’re another coil in the spiral, and everything is new again. So yeah I guess you can find love at O’Brien’s.
